DC fans Birds Of Prey is out this week and well I thought that in honour of that film being released I would take a look at another film to feature Harley Quinn. Well I thought that this one would do the trick because not only does it feature Harley who is a main character in both the Birds Of Prey movie and the upcoming Suicide Squad sequel / reboot but it also has the Suicide Squad and so here is my review of Suicide Squad: Hell To Pay.
The plot of this movie is Task Force X is tasked with finding out a special card for Amanda Waller but she's not the only one that wants the card and so a race to find the card to stop something truly evil is on. This right here is what the plot of the live action Suicide Squad movie should have been it's fun as hell and all of the characters get a chance to shine and it has plenty of twists and turns to keep people interested.
Starring in this film is Christian Slater as Floyd Lawton / Deadshot , Vanessa Williams asAmanda Waller , Billy Brown as Ben Turner / Bronze Tiger , Liam McIntyre as George Harkness / Captain Boomerang , Tara Strong as Harleen Quinzel / Harley Quinn , Kristin Bauer van Straten as Crystal Frost / Killer Frost , Gideon Emery as Sameer Park / Copperhead , C. Thomas Howell as Eobard Thawne / Professor Zoom / Reverse-Flash , Jim Pirri as Vandal Savage and Werner Zytle / Count Vertigo , Dania Ramirez as Scandal Savage , Dave Fennoy as Blockbuster and Tobias Whale amd Black Manta and lastly Greg Grunberg as Steel Maxum / Doctor Fate.
In my opinion the acting in the film is alot better then what it really had any right to be and there's alot of fairly big names for a straight to DVD animated movie which is pretty shocking. Like I said the acting is alot better than it had any right to be simply because even tho the Suicide Squad movie had been released they still weren't mainstream popular and so it would have been understandable if the actors chose to turn in a bad performance but to their credit they didn't.
The animation for the film was done by DR Movie whose name you might not reconise but whose work you've seen since they have worked on Avatar: The Last Airbender , The Batman and Batman And Harley Quinn among many others. With that kind of pedigree behind them it won't shock you to learn that I liked the animation in this film it was very energised and extremely detailed like alot more then what I remember it being to out it simply it looked like the kind of animation that you would see in a theatrically released movie.
I have to give this film some credit for using lesser known members of the team and to some degree lesser known villains and while yes Vandal Savage was used quite a bit in the Arrowverse in my eyes he's still not mainstream. There are even characters that I haven't heard of before this film like for example Vandal's daughter Scandal and her lover Knockout as well as Copperhead to name but a few examples.
As i've said this film is everything that the 2016 live action film should have been simply because they got everything right about the team where as the live action movie tried but it was let down by studio interference. This film however doesn't have any of that and because of it the team come across alot better and more importantly the film is alot better because of the fact there's no interference from the studio.
In one of maybe a few negative things I have to say about the film the story even tho it's a fun story and one that works for the team. It's not really a story that fit s a feature length movie and because of that we get alot of scenes that don't go anywhere , the 2016 film had a bad story for the team but the story it had was at least feature length and so there wasn't that much padding out I honestly feel that that this film should have been around an hour and fifteen minuets long just because if you remove the padding in the film that's sort of the running time you'd end up with.
Another negative I have about the film is that it doesn't take full advantage of it's R rating all they use it for is for some gore and that's really it. Which for any other movie would be fine but these are villains so these guys would swear at every possible chance and not use words that sound like there swearing even tho there really not or replace swear words with other words but to give them credit they did give the Suicide Squad the rating that they deserve which is always a good thing in my opinion and I hope that Warner Bros. give the 2021 film the same rating but they most likely won't tho.
One thing I noticed when I was watching the movie for this review is that the opening titles have a very Grindhouse feel to them. Heck the same thing can also be said for the whole film since it has a very grindhouse vibe and feel to it which oddly works for the Suicide Squad and it honestly makes me wonder why no one has ever tried to take this approach with these more adult comic book characters before since it could work very well.
Now then since this is a super hero comic book film that does mean that we have to talk about the action in the film. This is perhaps the best use of the R rating since it allows the team to really go crazy which is what the members of the Suicide Squad would do , it also helps that the action in this film is also really fun and creative as hell with each member getting a chance to shine and we get a lot of humour in those scenes which is always welcome in my opinion.
Overall this is by far better then the live action film which to me is really telling since you would think that the live action division would get the characters more right since they involve the creators but nope they don't it's the animation division that gets them right. As I said at the start of the review i'm only covering this movie because Birds Of Prey is out this week however now I have to find something to cover when The Suicide Squad comes out , this film gets an 8.5 out of 10 from this animation fan.